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Editorial: Historic brick paving part of city pattern

Pensacola News Journal
Published 6:00 a.m. CT Jan. 20, 2018

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.(Photo: Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico)

Last Tuesday Florida’s legendary former governor and senator, Bob Graham, arrived in Pensacola to speak about the importance of citizen engagement to improve government, particularly on the local level.

Just one day before, Mayor Ashton Hayward’s office offered a slap in the face to citizens of Old East Hill who had engaged the city about restoring a historic brick street that was discovered in their neighborhood last year. Instead of working with citizens to preserve the street and enhancing the larger historic quality of downtown Pensacola, on MLK Day while city offices were closed, the city simply paved it. So much for citizen engagement.

The PNJ’s Jim Little reported that work crews had initially discovered the historic brick on North Hayne Street last August. And in accordance with city policy, the street work was halted and residents of Old East Hill were notified.

Christian Wagley, president of the Old East Hill Property Owners Association, said the group held two public meetings on the discovery and that residents voiced their overwhelming support for restoring the street. The residents then contacted the city about their collective desire to restore the street.

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Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

Some residents who live near Hayne Street in Pensacola are upset after crews on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, paved over the street’s original brick paving. The original paving was unearthed in August.
Courtesy of Barbara D’Amico

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According to Sen. Graham’s talks last week, the residents did exactly what citizens are supposed to do in order to get positive action from their government: Identify a goal. Organize. And seek action from government officials with authority to help.

Instead, all they got from Hayward’s top administrator, Eric Olson, was notice that the road would be paved over anyways, and feckless finger-pointing to blame the city council. Olson's response letter is an textbook example of unhelpful government. It offers no solutions. No ideas. No help. No proactiveness. Just a cold, bureaucratic excuse for why something can't be done. So much for leadership and accountability.

After the brick was covered last week, Hayward’s spokesman Vernon Stewart said it happened because restoring the street would have been too costly. How costly? Who knows. Officials from the mayor’s office haven’t provided residents with any specific dollar figures to justify why repaving plans couldn’t have changed once the brick was discovered. But it’s hard to accept the excuse of hard-line-budgeting inflexibility from the same administration that's had no problem adapting when plans for a new Bayview Community Center ran $2 million over budget.

But the sad importance of this story is more than just the aesthetic quality of a historic city street or the costs of a $15 million citywide road paving project.

Olson letter on street restoration(Photo: City of Pensacola)

It is the fact that when a group of citizens engaged the mayor’s office in order to achieve a positive goal, they were ignored. Their request was simply rejected without any indication of due diligence or an earnest effort on the part of government to at least try to find a solution.

"My biggest disappointment is I never really saw a full effort by the city to really fully articulate what the costs really were, and what the long-term potential maintenance benefits could be to the city," Wagley said. "It appeared they never really had any interest in doing any restoration from the very beginning, and they were just kind of working through the process as required by council."

And then to add insult to injury, Hayward and the highly-paid, taxpayer-funded officials in his administration sought to shirk off any obligation to help residents by simply blaming other elected officials. That’s not leadership. There was an opportunity to help and a city official chose not to. That’s not the way government is supposed to work.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Sen. Bob Graham said so himself.

Yet whether it’s been residents’ ideas on historic brick streets or historic Bruce Beach, or business owners’ problems with panhandling and parking, or investors’ opportunities at Maritime Park or in West Pensacola, Hayward’s office has shown a pattern of ignoring residents’ concerns, shrugging off leadership challenges, or becoming adversarial, rather than acting as a collaborative entity to honestly help citizens who are seeking to change their community.

This isn’t anything new and it's not the end of the world. But it's worth taking note of how this happens because the pattern of unresponsive government doesn’t get any less disappointing. The MLK Day paving of a historic street in direct defiance of neighborhood residents is just another brick in an ongoing and unfortunate road.